


Poison and Wine

by A_Firewatchers_Daughter



Category: The Hour (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:47:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26032117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Firewatchers_Daughter/pseuds/A_Firewatchers_Daughter
Summary: A follow on to the scene in the pub, in which Lix catches herself thinking about the one thing one should never think of: love."Your hands can heal, your hands can bruise; I don't have a choice but I'd still choose you; I don't love you but I always will." ('Poison and Wine', The Civil Wars.)
Relationships: Randall Brown/Lix Storm
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	Poison and Wine

“That’s a start.”

Lix Storm’s body seemed to float on the air. Not in love or fear, but in sheer panic.

Until he said that, she had managed to convince herself there was nothing there. That they were old friends with a mystery that meant they could never be truly separated. She told herself she did not love him.

Here, though, his hand in hers, her head on his shoulder, she knew that while she could not love him, she always would love him. It was a cruel absurdity, really, that Lix felt love but could not allow herself to freely give it. She gave it in miniscule doses of advice and comfort and hoped it would be enough for those she loved to know it.

This man, though, he knew everything about her. Everything she did not wish him to know. To trust him with that was impossible; he was as human as anyone else and would surely use his knowledge to his own advantage, regardless of how it affected her. Though his demeanour did not tell of it, he was capable of administering poison, if only accidentally.

Much more consistently, however, Randall Brown was like wine to her. An acquired taste, and not to everyone’s liking, but to Lix…well, she had once adored the man. Never told him, for she was more a coward than he, but she did adore him. There were days she was sure it never left her, and others where she could convince herself she never had felt it. In those days of civil war, when they had walked broken lines on which they could easily have died, Randall was her wine when they reached any kind of safety. He might have been odd, but he was interesting and, to Lix’s own surprise, warm. That was why she did not love him, perhaps. It wasn’t love. It was more. It was stronger, more enduring, more heart-wrenching than any other love she had known.

But a love for wine could turn into an addiction. Who knew that better than Lix? She may have functioned better with it than Hector did, but she was no less an alcoholic than he was. She knew it. She knew it well. After all, had she known a morning when she could not taste the previous night on her own breath?

Randall no longer drank. He had learned better. Or maybe he was just more willing to bear the pain that came with sobriety. Clarity and complete awareness were two notions that scared Lix half to death.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Randall.

Lix flinched. She didn’t mean to; it was just that she had been hauled unwillingly from her own head. But Randall never was one to miss a detail like that. Lix felt him lift his head from hers. He squeezed her hand. She shifted slightly to look up into his face, never taking her face from his shoulder. “Don’t ask difficult questions,” she said. There was no keeping that begging note out of her voice.

“Lix,” he sighed, “please don’t do this. You’re not as hard faced as you’d like the world to believe.” His fingers brushed against her cheek. “I think you forget I know you.”

That touch came like a punch across the face. His hands left a bruise on her soul like she had never known, and yet eased her anguish at the same time. “I don’t think you know me,” she replied; her voice was hoarse, broken like glass. “Not anymore.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “You haven’t changed as much as you think.”

“This world, Randall, it changes people.”

“That’s true, but you’re still the same person you were twenty years ago. Older, perhaps, and with a bigger alcohol problem,” he said, nodding across the table at the empty glass she had left behind her, “but still fundamentally _you_. That’s how I know all the things you don’t want me to know, even now.”

He almost smiled. Lix didn’t let it escape her notice that he nearly smiled at the thought of knowing her better than anyone else. “Love,” she eventually told him.

“What?”

“I was thinking about love,” she said, “and what it is to go one step beyond love.”

Randall said nothing. Lix rather thought she had rendered him speechless. That was satisfying, since the man had an answer for just about anything.

“And the price we pay for it.”

“We always have to pay for love. To be loved, you must be known, and when you’re known, you’re vulnerable. When you love someone, there is every chance they will love you in return, and that’s the reason it requires courage.”

There it was. Exactly what Lix already knew. “The problem being, of course, that I am a coward.”

“You’re frightened. You’re not a coward until you decide to back down to it.”

Lix turned her head away. The choice was not hers. Not really. Maybe it had been in the beginning, but to feel nothing for him was no longer an option.

As he took his hand from her leg and put it around her shoulders, she realised that even if the choice was hers to make, she would still choose to know him. To love him. What would her life be if she didn’t? The hole that would remain would swallow her up, because the only person she might have loved more was their child. The child they were looking for. The child Lix had loved so much she had offered her up to someone who could give her more than she could.

“You are no coward, Lix Storm.”


End file.
